Have you noticed that the people who claim they’re fighting fascism are the ones smashing windows, starting fires, hurling rocks at police, beating people up and denying basic rights to others? They haven’t.

There are fascists on campus. Protesters don’t realize it’s them, not Milo Yiannopoulos

I suggest, as a corollary to Orwell’s prescient observation that (I’m paraphrasing) some things are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them, that should you seek stupidity in depth and a full lock on all mental development, enroll in a prestige high-fee North American liberal university. Further, I hold that whatever debates may be underway about the targets of Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, the modern university is the only institution that has taken that noble work for use as a manual.

For where else are words turned quite upside down, flipped over to stand on their bruised heads and told to dance to the rigorous tunes of fanatics? For it is only on a university campus that simple, basic words are made by violence to take on their exact and opposite meanings: up is down, right is wrong, day is night, and anti-fascism is fascism…

Now what do we call it when people in black uniforms and face masks storm a speaking venue, assault attendees, light fires and throw bricks at police with the express purpose of shutting down a speech? Would “fascist” work for you? In this context, and remembering it is a university campus where this outrage was perpetrated, I think fascist will serve quite nicely. And then we may advance to giving the name of the group that sponsored this giddy fit of intolerance and mayhem. They call themselves “AntiFa” which is the cute way campus blackshirts like to spell anti-fascist these days.

Kimberly Guilfoyle recently made the same point during an appearance on the Lou Dobbs show.

Democrats and their allies in media keep making excuses for this, insisting that the “mostly peaceful” protests can’t be judged by the actions of a violent few. Remember when they treated the Tea Party with such kid gloves? Neither does anyone else.

Comments

It’s because they are all uneducated rubes who don’t bother to look anything up and who would rather destroy what someone else created than to be law abiding and earn their own way. They will be the new unemployables.

Those committing violence in the recent incident in Berkeley are believed to have been the Black Bloc, an anarchist group from off-campus. Fascism is a far cry from anarchism. Perhaps the word you are looking for is “extremist”.

Fascists are socialists. Anarchists are, well, something, but most of them deep down have a socialist core. There are few pure anarchists. So it’s perfectly okay to accuse 98% of anarchists of fascism, since that in the end is where most of them would live.

“Extremism” is a reasonable word except that it’s been drained of meaning — as I suspect “fascism” will be as well. To call someone an “extremist” is an incomplete label at best — what are they extreme about? Whereas to call someone a fascist, or communist, etc., you at least had some idea of where their heads were.

The Black Bloc are indeed anarchists. They’ve allied themselves with the fascist-socialist Left. Calling them “fascists” isn’t so wrong.

It’s not splitting hairs to point out the distinction between means and ends, and the vast gulf between fascism and anarchism.

stevewhitemd: To call someone an “extremist” is an incomplete label at best — what are they extreme about?

That’s right. It is an incomplete label. They may an extremist for animal rights. They may be an extremist for a utopian society. What makes them an extremist is that they believe the ends justify whatever means.

I get your meaning, but it’s so hard to pin down a definition of fascism. Even Orwell couldn’t do it, and he actually fought against fascists in Spain. He held out hope for a future definition, but I doubt that will ever come. The closest synonym he could come up with for “fascist” was “bully”.

That’s it; fascism is nothing but political thuggery, using street violence to gain power, and oppressive force to keep it once they’re in power. I would say that fascism is not really about ENDS, but about MEANS, and the actions of the so-called Anti-Fa Blackshirts fit the bill.

Here’s what Mussolini had to say about Fascist ideology — “We have no fixed principles, and we have none because we are no church, we are a movement. We are not a party, we are an athletic body of men.”.

They lie. They’re no more anarchists than they are anti-fascists. Why get fooled by the labels they apply to themselves to trick the gullible? A person labeling themselves a “pro-democracy” demonstrator throwing a molotov cocktail because they lost an election is not pro-democracy.

How hard is that to figure out, Zachriel?

They’re the kind of people who think that as long as they’re wearing a “Love Trumps Hate” T-shirt it’s OK to punch out a pair of elderly couples walking into Denny’s for the early bird special and put them in the hospital for the crime of wearing “Make America Great Again” ball caps. And then to blame their victims for being the real H8rs. And they’re fighting H8. Really? Are you going to buy that?

But that’s been the whole point of the campus snowflake movement, which is the culmination of a decades long indoctrination effort to train people that speech that they disapprove of is really hate, an is in fact violence which deserves a violent response. And that a microaggression is really aggression, and that deserves physical aggression in return.

Remember Vester Lee “everything you ever said to me was a racial slur so I’m going to kill you” Flanagan?

He was the poster child for the mindset if not the politics. These people think exactly the same way; everything they do is justified because you, society, have done worse to them. Except they’re totalitarian thugs engaged in political violence because they tried to get what they wanted through the system; a centrally planned economy that gives them what they want for free with associated police state that makes sure nobody commits crimespeak and wrongthingk. And America didn’t give their vision to them and the only possible reason America could have rejecting their desires is that America hates minorities, women, gays, and the environment. And they already think exactly how Hitler/Stalin/Kim il Sung indoctrinated their Concentration Camp/Gulag guards to think about their victims.

The Brownshirts were German Nazis. The genuine, bona fide Fascist Blackshirt squadristi were the Camicie Nere, the Blackshirts, dressed in black and acting much like the Black Bloc. Nazis were called Fascists because they were war allies with Italy, and so leftists could obscure the name National Socialist. Calling Nazis fascists simply because of their Axis allegiance makes as much sense as calling either group Japanese Imperialists.

great unknown: Since Google has just redefined “fascism” as being right-wing

Fascism found its primary support on the political right; considered on the political right by most scholars, then and now; by ordinary usage, then and now; and nowadays neo-Fascists are nearly always considered to be on the political right.

Fascism found its primary support on the political right; considered on the political right by most scholars, then and now; by ordinary usage, then and now; and nowadays neo-Fascists are nearly always considered to be on the political right.

No, it didn’t. Hayek pointed out the curious fact that all the socialist refugees from Germany who were going around Britain urging socialism were Jews. What happened to all the non-Jewish socialists, he asked. Why weren’t they agitating in the UK too? The answer, he explained, was that they had all joined the Nazis, and the only reason the Jewish ones hadn’t done so too was that they weren’t welcome.

1) Government controlled economy through Indirect means. Businesses remain independent but all major decisions are made by central government regulation (eg. Obamacare). This is different from the Direct economic control by seizing the means of production that Marxist Socialism originally called for. This was Hitler’s “improvement” on Marxism, of which he was immensely proud, and which he gave dozens of speeches detailing. Once in power, he put this in place for every major industry nationwide.

2) Totalitarian Government power. Essential for #1 above. Like ALL forms of Socialism, in order to achieve the desired ends, the government must have absolute power to enact the ideology.

3) Nationalism. This is where the Right/Left confusion comes in. To Europeans, ALL Nationalist governments are, by definition, “right-wing”, so they tag Fascists as “hard-right”. To Americans, Fascism is just a variant on Socialism and therefore, obviously, Left-wing.

^^^ Note that the ONLY difference between Fascism and Progressivism is that the former are Nationalist and the latter Multi-Nationalists.

I don’t believe I’ve encountered so many as two people—ever—who could define “fascist” competently, and even that is being generous. Everybody thinks he knows what fascism is, but since everyone’s definition is radically different, the word is useless for purposes of meaningful communication. The only understanding in common is that it’s bad; so it’s a handy, albeit basically mindless, pejorative.

“Brownshirt”, though, is harder to misunderstand. I don’t run into many people who don’t have a fairly good sense of what a Brownshirt is. And what we’re seeing here is Brownshirt behavior. There’s not much room for debate about that.

However, to the Liberal mindset, that’s not necessarily bad. For the tenets of modern liberalism to make any sense at all, one has to postulate a tendentious understanding of good vs. bad. One can practice good racism, to the point of making it official government policy, to oppose bad racism. This is the sole justification for race-based Affirmative Action. Ditto for good sexism vs. bad sexism, good censorship vs bad censorship, good totalitarianism vs bad totalitarianism. And, obviously, good street violence, oppression, and Brownshirtism vs. bad street violence, oppression, and Brownshirtism. Even if the bad versions of street violence, oppression, and Brownshirtism are not actually in evidence, as they aren’t here.

“Antifa” is what European fascists call themselves. They are a barely hidden arm of the leftist governments there, and when they show up to hurt people and break things the police do not stop them. The fascists were always on the left. Always. Claiming fascism to be right-wing is one of the left’s big lies, along with “we on the left are not authoritarians, that’s right-wing”.

randian: Claiming fascism to be right-wing is one of the left’s big lies, along with “we on the left are not authoritarians, that’s right-wing”.

The re-definition of fascism is recent. Fascism has nearly always been considered a movement on the political right, then and now, scholarly and lay. Even today, neo-fascists are nearly always considered to be on the right, and often associated with others also on the right.

You are conflating authoritarianism with the left-right spectrum. There are authoritarians on the left, and there are authoritarians on the right. There are libertarians on the left, and there are authoritarians on the right. The left-right (egalitarian-hierarchical) spectrum is orthogonal to the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum.

Fascism has only ever been considered a movement on the right by rival leftists seeking to distance themselves from it. Fascism is a Marxist heresy, plain and simple. Mussolini broke from Marxism when he decided to support Italy in WW1.

Milhouse: Fascism has only ever been considered a movement on the right by rival leftists seeking to distance themselves from it.

The vast majority of scholars place fascism on the political right, and that is where they found their support.

• Nazism and the Radical Right in Austria 1918-1934, Lauridsen.
• The Routledge companion to fascism and the far right, Paul Davies.
• The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, edited by Gottlieb & Linehan.
• Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right, Griffin et al.
• France in The Era of Fascism: Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, edited by Jenkins.
• Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe (Studies in European Culture and History), edited by Weitz & Fenner.

That’s how the term was used then, and that’s how the term is used today. The term fascism or neo-Nazi is even today applied to radicals on the political right.

Hi Zach, good to see you back 🙂 I do have to respond to this post, though, because it’s rather facile. Just because “everyone agrees” that fascism is far-right doesn’t make it so. Indeed, this is simply more leftist propaganda designed to demonize nationalism (and patriotism, for that matter). Not everyone uses the term “fascism” to mean the political right. I don’t. Nor, it would appear, do others here. Look at who “applies” fascism to the political right. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out.

How about adding F. A. Hayek to your reading list? Writing in 1933, he noted that “The persecution of the Marxists, and of democrats in general, tends to obscure the fundamental fact that National Socialism is a genuine socialist movement, whose leading ideas are the final fruit of the anti-liberal tendencies which have steadily gained ground in Germany since the later part of the Bismarckian era, and which led the majority of the German intelligentsia first to “socialism of the chair” and later to Marxism in its social-democratic or communist form.”

Hitler didn’t (immediately) go after the right wing in Germany, such as it was; he eliminated communists and socialists, those best poised to steal his supporters. Ditto Mussolini. They were competing against socialism and communism (the former, famously, merely a path to the latter–that’s Lenin, if you want to add him to your reading list, too), so these were the enemies they eradicated first.

You had to dig deep to find that one, a footnote referring to a memo of a heterodox economist. In any case, the quote refers to socialism, not the left-right spectrum. There are right-wing forms of socialism. Nor was Nazism particularly concerned with economic theory, but had much more to do with forming a cohesive ethnic state subservient to an authoritarian leader, which is right-wing by definition.

No, Zach, I didn’t have to dig deep to find a quote by Hayek. I happen to have read everything by him that I could get my hands on. It’s only a footnote in the material I linked, I initially read it in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (I very much recommend reading the entire thing), and he was making a serious point about the conjunction between socialism and Hitler’s National Socialist party. In 1933. As an economist, he saw immediately what the Nazis were about, and it was a left-wing movement then just as its remnants are now.

Nazism wasn’t concerned with economic theory? That’s absurd. Of course it was. Why do you think Hitler took over the economy and “managed” it via private businesses that he ultimately controlled? How do you think he envisioned his Reich? It certainly was a military endeavor, but it was intended to be–and was–all-encompassing, including the German economy. He rose on the promise of restoring not just German primacy in some abstract sense but in rescuing Germany from its failing economy by means of central planning (farming out that control to private business is a ruse). I’m dumbfounded by your comment. You can’t seriously believe that Nazism was unrelated to the German economy. What was Hitler’s platform? What did he promise the German people? What did he deliver in terms of the economy? How did he deliver it?

Anti-fascists have always behaved exactly like fascists. That’s because like any gang, fascists’ chief enemies have always been competing gangs with almost identical ideology and methods. The struggle between fascists and communists is exactly like that between the Crips and the Bloods, Hells Angels and the Bandidos, or the Calabrian and Sicilian mafias.